STILL CHANGING LIVES
Chapter 45
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he following testimonies of men and women from all
walks of life demonstrate the unity of Christian experience. While each one
embraces a different background, profession or culture, each points to the same
object as the source of new power for transformed lives-Jesus Christ. Multiply
these testimonies by the hundreds of thousands and you would begin to approach
something like the impact Christ has had on the world in the past two thousand
years.
Is the Christian experience valid? These and
millions more believe so, and have new lives to back up their statement.
POLICEMAN, Melvin Floyd
"I've been on both sides of the fence: a gang
member as well as a policeman. I have seen tragedy, permanent injury, property
damage, wasted lives and even death as a result of sin.
"My whole outlook on life has changed since
Christ came into my life and, being a Christian policeman, I view things much
differently. In all my duties I am constantly aware that I must share God's
wonderful plan of salvation with others as I continue 'on patrol for God.'
Melvin Floyd was voted by the National Jaycees as
one of 1969's "Ten Outstanding Young Men in America."
NAZI PILOT IN WORLD WAR II, Werner Moelders
Moelders was a colonel in the Luftwaffe, ace of all Germany's
aces, holder of the highest decoration his country awards her fighters-the
Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, with Oak Leaves and Diamonds.
He climbed from his riddled plane; his eyes were
glassy; his frozen hands trembled; his body still shook with emotion. Werner
Moelders, had looked on the face of Death, and he was changed. In those
terrible moments, almost unknown to himself, he had whispered: "God, God
Almighty in heaven -help me out of this. YOU alone can save me!" His words
had echoed in the cockpit of the plane- "Only God can help. . . "
Back in his quarters, Moelders shut himself up
alone. He had to have time to think. Clearly, faith in Hitler and Naziism could
not sustain him. His mind flew back to his home in Stettin, to his godly parents,
to the kindly pastor. He remembered the story of the cross and the redeeming
love of God in Christ Jesus, who died for sinners like him. And he knew he
could never have survived that dreadful danger out there if he had not called
on the everlasting God. Fear had taught him faith.
Now, freed forever from the nightmare of Naziism, he
felt relieved, happy; a sense of the reality of God filled his heart with
peace. He sat down and wrote out his thoughts in a letter to the Stettin pastor
...
Day after day Moelders spoke with his comrades about
his faith and about the love of God in Christ Jesus. But that did not suit his
masters. In a mysterious accident Germany's famous Number 1 ace was killed -
silenced forever, the Nazi leaders thought ...
The Gestapo went into action against the faithful
friends of Moelders who copied and distributed his letter. A reward of $40,000
was offered to anyone who would denounce a friend who believed what Moelders
believed and passed on his letter.
FORMER CRIMINAL, Leo D'Arcangelo
Pacing back and forth in his prison cell, Leo
D'Arcangelo was deeply disturbed. Who wouldn't be, facing what was ahead of
him?
As a boy of eleven, he had picked a lady's handbag
on a crowded trolley car. That was the start.
Five years of stealing followed before his first
arrest at sixteen in a Philadelphia department store.
Shortly after release he started mainlining heroin.
Then began the seemingly endless arrests: November, 1954, for use and
possession of drugs; January, 1955, for picking pockets. Shortly after, in Los
Angeles, Leo was arrested for jumping bail.
... As he paced his cell he noticed a few lines
crudely scrawled on the wall:
"When
you come to the end of your journey and this trouble is racked in your mind, and
there seems no other way out than by just mourning, turn to Jesus, for it is
Him that you must find."
This started him thinking: This is the end of my journey. What have I
got to show for it? Nothing except a lousy past and a worse future. Jesus, I need
Your help. I've made a mess of my life and this is the end of the journey, and
all the crying isn't going to change my past. Jesus, if You can change my life, please do it. Help me make tomorrow
different.
... For the first time Leo felt something besides
despair.
Released from prison in September 1958, Leo earned
his high school diploma and then went on to graduate from West Chester State
College and the Reformed Episcopal Seminary in Philadelphia.
He is presently active in prison work and as a speaker
in church and youth meetings. 17
MINISTER, Dr. Don E. Schooler
"In my first two churches I preached all that I
knew, honesty, faith (not knowing what it meant), good habits, church
attendance, honor, and a continual exhortation to be 'good,' to serve God. I
talked about the fruits without knowing the roots. Enthusiasm carried me in
those days-enthusiasm and youth. These two proved not to be enough.
"The marriage was getting difficult. My wife
believed one thing. I believed another. We decided to study Jesus, without any
helps of any kind, which we did with a small group for seven weeks in Canada
.... It began to dawn upon me that if I would put my will into God's hands ...
this would be equal to doing God's will.... I was committing myself to all of
God I could see in Jesus, plus all of God that would be revealed tomorrow and
the next day and the next.... The light broke upon me. I wept like a child
calling out to my wife: 'I have missed it. Utterly missed it.' All these years
I had preached only ethics, social and personal, but not the gospel.... The
gospel is the living Christ who has come to dwell in me. He has liberated me.
He assured me my sins were forgiven.... There was a new center for all my
social passion -it is not centered in human striving- it is centered in
Christ.... Power in some measure has come."
COACH -DALLAS COWBOYS, Tom Landry
"St. Augustine said, 'Thou hast made us for
Thyself, 0 God, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in
Thee.'
"Well, I discovered that truth at the age of
33. The most disappointing fact in my life, I believe, is that I waited so long
before I discovered the fellowship of Jesus Christ. How much more wonderful my
life would have been if I had taken this step many years earlier!"
GOLFER, Rik Massengale
In 1974, professional golfer Rik Massengale was
ready to exchange his clubs for farmer's overalls. Life, like his golf game,
had lost its zip. Massengale contemplated leaving the sport to go into the
dairy business.
Thin from the strain of the Professional Golfers
Association tour, his marriage beginning to sour, Massengale suffered through
his fifth season, a year in which his earnings dipped to $14,193.
But one night at home with his wife Cindy, Rik began
to watch The Greatest Story Ever Told,
a movie on the life of Christ. The
Massengales' lives - and Rick's erratic golf game - underwent a dramatic change
thereafter.
"We started questioning and decided to go to
the Bible study on the tour," recalls Massengale, a former University of
Texas star. Evangelist Billy Graham was the guest speaker the first night they
attended.
"I realized afterward that intellectually I had
always believed Christ was the Son of God," Rik says. "That week,
after Graham spoke, I asked Christ to come into my life."
With a new outlook on life, Massengale began to play
like a new golfer. "Before, if I blew a shot, I'd be torn up inside. Now
Christ has given me self-control and peace. A bogey is no longer the end of the
world."
Since Massengale's spiritual and mental turnabout,
he has captured several tournament titles, including the 1977 Bob Hope Desert
Classic. In the Hope Classic, he broke Arnold Palmer's longstanding record by
one stroke with a 23-under-par 337. The win boosted him high among the tour's
top money winners.
TENNIS PLAYER, Stan Smith
"I began meeting with a group of athletes at
the University of Southern California. These were different guys than I had
known before -and they told me about a Person who was very new and exciting to
me-Jesus Christ. Toward the end of that Year, I put my life into His hands. I
asked Him to give my life more meaning. He helped me find myself and He gave me
self-confidence.
"My frustration seemed to drain off. I was
confident again.
"Christ helped me win over myself. It's so
clear to me now why in all things I must be the mirror of His teachings."
FOOTBALL PLAYER, Roger
Staubach I
"My future reaches far beyond football, of
course, and this is what really excites me. Christianity is the most important
part of my life and I'll always speak out about it. I am fortunate to have been
blessed with certain talents and skills and they are the reason I have become a
public figure, in a position to attract attention and be heard. I would be
rejecting God's love and blessings if I didn't use my opportunities to the
utmost, to talk about my faith, and why it is precious to me. To enjoy
something beautiful like this to the fullest, you must share it."
MISS AMERICA 1973, Terry Meeuwsen Camburn
"From the time I was a small child, I dreamed
of being a professional singer and actress and seeing my name up on a marquee.
After a year of college, I had my first chance to sing with a small group in
nightclubs throughout the Midwest. On the road I was hit with a lot of things
that I wasn't prepared to handle: alcoholism, bad marriages and a lot of lonely
people who were trying to escape reality.
"Then in 1970, 1 joined the New Christy
Minstrels. But I was disillusioned with this experience, too, as we performed
50 weeks out of the year under all kinds of conditions. Still, I became
increasingly determined that, if I had to scratch my way to the top, I would.
"This all changed after a performance at a
Baptist college in Kansas. During the concert, the kids would clap every time
we mentioned anything about God or Jesus Christ. I thought they were crazy at
the time, but afterward, at a drive-in, one of the Christian students came up
and started talking to me.
"We small-talked about show business and life on
the road for awhile. Then she asked me a question that no one had ever asked me
in my 22 years: 'Are you a Christian?' When I replied that I believed in God,
she said, 'No, you don't understand,' and briefly explained about God's love
and His desire to have a relationship with me through Jesus Christ.
"She gave me a Four Spiritual Laws booklet and
told me to read it that night so we could talk about it over breakfast the next
morning. I was willing to do that because I saw that she had a peace that I didn't
have and was looking for. I started to just skim the booklet until I noticed
how brief and to the point it was. Before I knew it, I was reading the
suggested prayer at the end and asking God to forgive me and give me the peace
that I'd never found in show business.
"The next day, the Christian girl showed
genuine excitement about my decision and more love for me personally than I'd
seen in a long time. And as our group was about to leave, she gave me a Bible
and said, 'I don't care how busy you get -if you read a chapter a day, I
promise you your life will change.'
"And it did. I began to realize that Jesus was
someone who understood me and my insecurities and feelings about show business.
Specific things changed in my life, too. I was very overweight at the time and
smoked a pack and a half of cigarettes a day. That changed, and with it changed
the low self-image I'd always had.
"Soon after I left the Christies, I found
myself back home in DePere, Wisconsin, with no money and no way to get the professional
training I needed to sing and act. That's when a friend of mine encouraged me
to enter the Miss America pageant -even though I was feeling 'old' at 22. She
argued that, because it was a good, clean program, I wouldn't have to
compromise what I believed in and might even win the scholarship I needed.
"From that point on, God began opening doors,
working out His plan for my life. That plan included becoming Miss America
1973. Then, during my reign, God worked more changes -in my outlook on my
career and future. I realized that, though I'd been praying for God's direction
in my career, I wasn't really listening for His answers. Now I understand that
my first responsibility is to God, my second is to my husband (Tom) and
children as they come. After that I can begin to think about a career.
"It's funny how God has also given me a desire
to conform to His will. He still may lead me into a full-time career -just as
He's led me to put out a gospel album and begin writing a book. Only now my
motivation is different. I don't care about being in the limelight anymore
-because I've found that the only lasting things we do are the things we do for
Christ." 4/15-16
MOVIE ACTOR, Dean Jones
"I had attained many of my goals. I had a
beautiful lady who loved me, three wonderful kids, a $23,000 Ferrari, a garage
crowded with four racing motorcycles, a California avocado ranch, and I made
between $15,000 and $20,000 a week when I was working on films. Yet there was
no sense of fulfillment.
"In frustration I had driven my Ferrari at
100-plus miles per hour over the winding Malibu Canyon roads at night, not with
any desire to kill myself, but with a feeling that if I did lose control of the
car, so what? No great loss. I really played with the line at which the car could
stay glued to the pavement around the curves."
He once took a motorcycle trip with two friends into
Mexico's Baja Peninsula, miles from civilization. They stopped to buy some beer
from an incredibly poor Mexican family. Dean gave a machete to an old man and a
pair of levis to one of the young men. But what really shook him was a little
girl with open sores on her face. Flies were all over her, picking at the
sores.
"I was so angry that I
jumped on my bike and opened up the throttle wide-too wide for the rough
terrain," Dean says. "With total abandon, I cursed God and screamed
out at the wind, 'God, if You exist, which I doubt, why do You let little
children go through that kind of misery?'
"Tears blinded my eyes.
The last thing I remember was a small gully ahead of me. It triggered the
thought, Twist that throttle and get
that front wheel up!
"I didn't make it. When I came to, one of my
friends had his fist in my hip, trying to stop me from bleeding to death. The
rear foot peg of the cycle had shot through my hip, shattering my pelvis in 13
places. I had a brain concussion (with partial amnesia) and a separated right
shoulder. In addition, almost every inch of my body was sandpapered by the
desert floor. I lay there in shock for a day and a half before arrangements
could be made to transport me to a hospital in Burbank."
All of this hopelessness came to a head the summer
of 1973 in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, when Dean was doing a stage production of
1776.
"I felt so empty that I went to the lodge one night
and stood at the window gazing out at the sumptuous landscape," he says.
"I realized I had been motivated by self all my
years. But I had come to the point where self could no longer carry me through
life. There would come a time when I would not have enough motivation to stay
alive. I might even take a shotgun to the top of my head like Ernest Hemingway.
I turned from the window, walked to the edge of the bed, knelt and began to
pray.
" 'God, You probably don't exist. I'm probably
just talking to the walls here, but...'
"I began to pour out my doubts, weaknesses,
failures to God. I wept like a child.
"Finally I said something like, 'If You do
exist, if You are real, and if You will make Yourself known to me in some way,
I'll serve You the rest of my life.' It was a total commitment.
"Suddenly my soul was flooded with a peace that
passed understanding. It filled that emptiness. It was as though Bambi, the
little deer in the forest, heard everything go silent. The birds stopped
singing, the crickets stopped chirping, and all the other sounds just ended.
There was such a silence that it became something I listened to. I listened to
the calm. I had an inner spirit without agitation or anxiety."
At the time, Dean didn't fully understand what had
happened to him, but he and Lory ... began searching for a church. Finally God
led them to one in the San Fernando Valley, and February 10, 1974, both he and
Lory publicly confessed their faith in Jesus Christ.
SINGER, B. J. Thomas
By 1970 he had made $13 million. By 1976, despite his
success in selling more than 32 million records, including the hit recording,
"Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” B.J. Thomas was $800,000 in dept.
His life was bankrupt in more ways than financial. In
spite of his successful singing career, for years B.J. was about as miserable
as a man could be. He was a drug addict with a $3,000-a-week cocaine habit. In
addition, he was so hooked on uppers and downers that he was taking 40 to 50
pills at a time just to keep going.
“at 15, I started in music and almost immediately I got
involved with drugs,” Thomas said.
“Eleven years later,” Thomas added, “I was an addict. I
couldn’t go to sleep without it. I couldn’t do anything without it.”
Thomas was so doped up he barely remembers recording
his 1969 hit, “Raindrops.” And its success helped him even deeper into drugs.
Cocaine was ruling his life. His marriage was broken and he could barely
function.
Once he took 80 pills and was taken unconscious off a
plane in Hawaii. He was rushed to a hospital. He almost died of overdose, and
at the time he didn’t care if he died or not.
When he came to he asked the sister attending him in
the Catholic hospital if “it had been close.”
She said, “Very close,” and told him he had been on the
machine for an hour and 40 minutes, which was the only reason he pulled
through.
“I don’t understand why I made it,” he told the nurse.
“I really didn’t want to make it.”
She asked him to bow his head and she prayed for him.
She said, “God must have something He wants to do with your life.”
On a later tour he realized that he was losing his
mind. When his brother and his road man – the people who loved him – looked at
him in pity he hated them. “I wanted to kill them,” said Thomas. “In fact, I
was afraid I would.”
B.J. became so saturated with drugs he couldn’t sleep
for days. He could not get high. There was nothing he could do to get that
euphoric feeling any more. In desperation he called his wife, Gloria. He
thought maybe if he went home he could get a little sleep there.
“We had separated several times over the years,” Thomas
explained, “because I was acting so crazy.” But lately when he had called he
had sensed a peace and calmness coming from Gloria on the phone. She had asked
him to come home, saying, “There’s help here,” but she would not explain what
the help was…
When he arrived he found his wife had become a
Christian and that there were a lot of people praying for him and wanting to
talk to him about the Lord.
“That was the last thing I wanted to do,” Thomas said.
But one evening his wife got him to drop by the home of the friends who had led
her to the Lord.
The husband, Jim Reeves, was gone, but the wife
asked them to stay for dinner. With the husband away B. J. felt safe from
religious talk, and they stayed. "I felt such peace in that home," B.
J. said, "that I knew they must know God. When Jim came home I asked him
about it, and he began to tell me about the Lord.
"Jim Reeves told me that as he talked with me
there was something about me, or about my face or eyes that frightened
him," B. J. said. "He could tell I wanted to listen, but one minute I
was receptive and the next minute I was not. The strangeness startled him. He
asked if he could pray for a minute. He bowed his head right there at the
dining room table, and asked that if there were any forces of Satan or any
power of Satan in that room that were interfering with B. J. hearing the word
of God that by the shed blood of Jesus Christ they would leave."
"As he prayed," B. J. related, "there
was a disturbance in my chest. I felt for a minute a sharp pain and I thought I
might have a broken rib. Then I had the illusion that something was 'just
going' and a peace came over me. I had a receptive attitude and I listened
intently to all they told me. Then I put my head down and began to pray. I
prayed for about 20 minutes, and I prayed all the good things they told me I
should pray.
"When I raised my head these guys were crying,
and I was so happy I was just jumping around. That conversion experience to me
was just a miraculous thing. I had been such a bad person."
What happened that night caused a mental change and
a physical change in B. J. Thomas. He had some marijuana, but he went home and
threw it away. He had been dependent upon Valium for years. He needed that more
than all the other pills. But that night he stopped taking it.
B. J. expected terrible withdrawal pains. He was
willing to go through it. He had done so before, but had always gone back to drugs.
But this time he went through no withdrawal symptoms: no shakes, no bad
illusions or dreams. His deliverance from drugs was just as miraculous as his
salvation and from that day, January 29, 1976, to this, he has never doubted
his experience with the Lord or that his salvation was real.
AUTHOR, Eugenia Price
"At the age of thirty-three, I had almost lost
interest in finding the key to why I am here. My study of the philosophies had
stimulated my mind but had left my heart empty. My study of many of the
religions of the world left me exhausted. I knew that somehow I didn't have
enough desire to 'know righteousness,' to go through the elaborate intellectual
and spiritual gyrations required by them to 'reach God.'
"My life was won by Ellen Riley, a childhood
friend whom I saw again while in Charleston after those 18 years. Ellen had
become a dynamic Christian. Christ was a Person to her. She was home from New
York City on her vacation at the same time I was there from Chicago. When she
saw me again she was horrified to see the girl she had known as a bubbling,
happy teenager, now a tired, bored, would-be sophisticate. She said I looked as
though I was warding off a blow.
“......‘What do you really believe about God?' I asked her.
" 'I believe God came to earth in the Person of
Jesus Christ to show us what He is really like and to save us from sin.'
" . . . And so, on Sunday afternoon, October 2,
1949, after quite an argument on my part I just suddenly looked at her and
said: 'Okay, I guess you're right.' And that was it. God doesn't require any
big, formal introduction.
"Since then, day by day, life with Christ has
been a continuous experience of one new discovery after another. Now I like to
get up in the morning. He is my reason for waking Up!" 28/6-7
MEDICAL DOCTOR, Vernon R. Phillips
"After the war, I started general practice in
the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, area. I was introduced to a social life that I
thought necessary to be successful. This included frequent cocktail parties and
country club dances. I thought this was fine, because I relaxed from the
problems of the day and got away from reality for short periods.
"By 1952 1 had to do more relaxing by attending
parties two and three times a week. Before this time I would have considered
myself a heavy drinker, but now my drinking became uncontrollable.
"I suffered a decline in my medical practice,
and worst of all, the loss of the respect of my wife and family. I finally
admitted my desperate need of help.
" . . . A brother of mine had trusted Christ as
his Savior a year earlier. He invited me one day to go along with him to a
banquet of the Christian
Business Men's Committee. At this meeting I heard
testimonies in which men told how their lives had been changed. One man had had
a life quite similar to mine, until Christ transformed him.
" . . . These men were different from the men I
was associating with, and they were willing to help me when I was in serious
trouble. Greatest of all, they told me my need was knowing the Lord Jesus
Christ.
" . . . On May 21,
1959, while on a business trip, I was under deep conviction as I drove along. I
prayed to God to save me. I realized that I was lost and needed God's help. But
it was not until I said, 'Anything You want me to do, Lord, I will do,' that I
could believe, and the indescribable experience occurred. Tears of joy ran down
my cheeks as the tremendous load of sin was lifted. God gave me the assurance
that I was a new creature in Christ Jesus. I have not been tempted since to
take another drink of alcohol. My main problem was not alcoholism, but that I
did not know Jesus Christ."
FORMER WHITE HOUSE AIDE, Charles Colson
"I felt a strange deadness when I left the White
House. I should have been exhilarated because I'd done all the things I'd ever
set out to do, and in a hurry. I'd gone to law school nights, worked days,
earned scholarships, been the youngest company commander in the Marine Corps,
and the youngest administrative assistant on Capitol Hill. I had gotten to the
top of the mountain and I couldn't think of any other mountains.
"And then I saw Tom Phillips, an old friend.
He's a guy much like myself in that he was born to immigrant parents, he went
to school nights, he became an engineer at Raytheon when he was twenty-five and
by age thirty-six was executive vice president. By age forty, he was president
-a tremendous success story. A busy, frantic worker, barking orders, very
aggressive, very dynamic.
"When I saw him in the spring of '73, he seemed
totally different. He was smiling; he was radiant, caring about me. I asked him
what had happened. He told me he'd committed his life to Jesus Christ.
"I'd ... learned about Jesus Christ as an
historical figure, a prophet, a cut above His time. But the whole idea of an
intelligent, educated, successful businessman saying, 'I've accepted Him and
committed my life,' just threw me. I thought Tom had had some sort of strange
experience -I changed the subject.
"The months went by, very tough months in
Washington. And everything that Tom represented, Washington wasn't. I marveled
at it and wanted to find out for myself, so I called him and spent an evening
on his porch. He read to me from C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, the chapter on pride. It was a torpedo. I
could just see my whole life. I felt unclean. Then Tom told me he had had a
real spiritual longing until he went to a Billy Graham rally in New York and
accepted Christ.
"It was such a beautiful story, but I wouldn't
admit it to him. I was the big-time Washington lawyer.
"That night I couldn't get the keys into the
ignition because I was crying so hard. I didn't like to cry because I never
liked to show weakness. I prayed in the car, and thought. It was sort of an
eerie feeling sitting by the side of the road alone, and yet not alone now.
There was a tremendous cleansing feeling that night. Then I spent a week on the
Maine Coast, and later that week, the case for Christ became obvious to me.
"My biggest problem had always been the
intellectual reservations. I knew there was a God, but I could never see how
man could have a personal relationship with Him. But the intellectual case for
Christianity became powerful to me after reading Mere Christianity. At the end
of the week I could not imagine how you could not believe in Jesus
Christ."
FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE
U. N. GENERAL ASSEMBLY, Charles Malik
"Having fully realized that the whole world is as
it were dissolving before our very eyes, it is impossible then to ask more
far-reaching questions than these three: What is then emerging? Where is Christ
in it? And what difference are we making to the whole thing?.
"In one word: the life of the spirit is life in
Jesus Christ. In Him and through Him we can raise and answer these three
fundamental questions. In Him and through Him we can be saved from the
universal dissolution of the world.
"These are great days and what is being decided
in them is absolutely historic. But all these things are going to pass, and with
them life itself. What, then, is the life that does not pass? What, then, is
life eternal? This is the first and last question. I believe that 'this is life
eternal, that they might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom
Thou has sent' (John 17:3).... Faith in Jesus Christ is the first and last
meaning of our life. I do not care who or what you are; I put only one question
to you: Do you believe in Jesus Christ?"
Dr. Charles Malik served as President of the United
Nations General Assembly in 1959. He is now a professor at The American
University in Beirut, Lebanon.
PHILOSOPHER, Cyril E. M. Joad
Dr. Cyril E. M. Joad, head of the philosophy
department of the University of London ... believed that Jesus was only a man,
that God was a part of the universe and that, should the universe be destroyed,
God would be destroyed. He believed that there is no such thing as sin, that
man was destined for Utopia; that given a little time, man would have heaven on
earth.
In 1948, in the magazine section of the Los Angeles Times, there was a
picture of that venerable old scholar, and with it was a statement concerning
the dramatic change that had taken place in his life. He told how for many
years he had been antagonistic toward Christianity. Now he had come to believe
that sin was a reality.
Two world wars and the imminence of another had
demonstrated conclusively to him that man was sinful. Now he believed that the
only explanation for sin was found in the Word of God, and the only solution
was found in the cross of Jesus Christ. Before his death, Dr. Joad became a
zealous follower of the Savior.
PSYCHOLOGIST, Ruda
The professor was too polite to say that the
landlord had warned him about his Protestant neighbor. "He is a very
zealous Protestant," the owner of the apartment building had said.
"He will try to convert you."
Professor Ruda's face then had creased with a soft
Latin smile. "Let him. I will match wits with him. Perhaps I can convert
him to be a freethinker like me. No?"
The Professor felt that he had little to fear from a
zealous Protestant. He knew something about religion and psychology himself.
Had he not been raised in the Catholic faith, even though he no longer accepted
the old dogmas? He had his doctorate in psychology and was professor of logic
and researcher in psychology in the Argentine University of the South. His
major field of study and teaching was in personality development. Perhaps, he thought, I will
learn something by analyzing the personality of a Protestant missionary.
After attending the missionary's church and after
exchanging beliefs hoping to show him his error, Ruda finally made the decision
for Christ. He explains it his way:
"As a research psychologist in the field of
personality development I analyzed hundreds of people. I sought to discover the
inner motivation which governs the basic attitudes of living.
"But when I met Charles Campbell I knew that
here was someone whose personality I could not rationally explain. Then when I
became a Christian I understood that the life-changing ingredient in his life
was Christ. Today, the most important proof to me of Christianity is the
amazing change that has come into my own life. Peace and confidence in God have
taken the place of anxiety and worry. My troubles increased when I became a
Christian, but Christ gave me power to have victory over all of them."
UNIVERSITY LECTURER, Carsten Thiede
"From the beginning of my time at school I was very
interested in religion. I read many of the major religious writings of mankind,
including the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad-Gita (Hindu) and the Tao Te Ching
(Taoism), wanting to make up my own mind, to form my personal opinion from an
intellectual point of view as to what I would believe.
"In 1966 Billy Graham held a Crusade in Berlin,
and along with 10,000-15,000 other people, I sat in a large hall and listened
as he explained the Jesus Christ of the Bible. As he spoke, I realized that all
of my attempts to form a personal opinion were a preparation for this very
moment when I needed to confess my sins and give myself to Christ. From my own
readings and Dr. Graham's message, I was able to judge that the gospel of Jesus
Christ was the real truth for me.
"At first I did not regard the other religions
as false, believing that they might have part of the truth or have another way
of expressing the truth. But later, as I continued my studies in comparative
literature at the Universities of Berlin and Geneva, I realized that there is
no alternative to the historical truth of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Under the most careful scrutiny, no scientist, no historian, no literacy
critic, if he is honest to his science, will be able to deny the basic truth of
the gospel of the New Testament. No other religion or philosophy of mankind can
claim this kind of historical support.
"There are hardly any universities now where
true Christian belief is taught. Modern German theologians and philosophers
claim to use objective methods of literacy analysis in determining that much of
the New Testament is legendary. But as I compare the writings of these critics,
I find that they are working with pre-formed biases, leaving out any historical
truth which might contradict their own beliefs.
"I believe it can be shown that everything
written in the New Testament has historical and literary proof to back it up. I
would like to introduce a Christian method of analyzing literature, mainly to
provide students with an alternative to common methods of interpreting
literature (positivism, structuralism, new criticsm, existentialism, etc.). It
seems like a mammoth task, but it is not merely I trying to do it, but Christ
working in me, giving me the ideas.
"Through the years I have grown stronger and
more certain of my beliefs. My desire to find the truth through the examination
of various religions and philosophies was satisfied in the words and person of
Jesus Christ. Within myself I am certain that my faith is based on facts that
can never be proved false."
Carsten Thiede is assistant lecturer in German and
Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva.
FORMER GANG LEADER, Nicky Cruz
This excerpt from Nicky Cruz's autobiography, Ruiz Baby Ruiz, tells of his
conversion:
"Wilkerson was speaking again. He said
something about repenting for your sin. I was under the influence of a power a
million times stronger than any drug. I was not responsible for my movements,
actions or words. It was as though I had been caught in a wild torrent of a
rampaging river. I was powerless to resist. I didn't understand what was taking
place within me. I only knew the fear was gone.
"Wilkerson was speaking again. 'He's here! He's
in this room. He's come especially for you. If you want your life changed, now
is the time.' Then he shouted with authority: 'Stand up! Those who will receive
Jesus Christ and be changed -stand up! Come forward!'